Amateur astronomers unexpectedly record asteroid hitting Jupiter

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Jupiter is a popular target for amateur astronomers because it’s big and has some fascinating features that show up well on camera. A few people had their telescopes trained on Jupiter several days ago when they spotted something rather unexpected: something hit it. Of course, things hit Jupiter all the time, but this time someone captured it on video using consumer telescopes.

You can see the impact in the videos below. The bright flash (on the right side of the planet in the image) is consistent with what we’d expect from an asteroid or comet impacting Jupiter’s thick gas atmosphere. When the first video emerged, captured on March 17 by Gerrit Kernbauer in Australia, it seemed likely that we were looking at an impact. There were other possibilities like an aberration in the telescope or reflection in Earth’s atmosphere. Kernbauer was actually taking a video of Jupiter in order to stack the frames and filter out atmospheric distortion, resulting in a cleaner image.

In the way of confirmation, you can’t ask for more than the video captured by Irish amateur astronomer John McKeon. While working on the same multiple frame capture, he spotted the same flash of light on Jupiter, indicating this actually happened on the planet. Barring aliens, an asteroid or comet impact is the most likely culprit.

Phil Plait from Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog speculates that the object was probably in the tens of meters. That might not seem very big — after all, we saw the flash all the way from Earth. However, Jupiter is huge and has the gravity to match. When something is pulled into Jupiter’s atmosphere, it gets moving quite fast, and impact energy is equal to the square of velocity. If something is moving twice as fast, it has four times the energy. Something approaching Jupiter will hit with about five times the velocity as it would Earth, so that’s 25 times the energy.

The asteroid that exploded over Russia in 2013 was just 19 meters across, and it exploded with half a megaton of energy. With 25 times that energy, you can see how some amateur astronomers were able to spot this impact on Jupiter from their backyards.